Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (54 page)

The conspiracy has made potent use of the spurious charge of "rape" as a political weapon. The charge of "rape" was consciously forged as a matter of state policy.
It
emerged in the Southern states at the same historic moment as the poll tax.
It
has since consistently been used to terrorize militant Negroes with the ever-present menace of death by lynching or by "legal murder" through police, incited mobs, and venal courts. Examples of how the cry of "rape" is used, invariably on the basis of race, abound in numerous cases. . . . The genocidal, murderous quality of the charge of "rape" is apparent . . .

It was not the charge of rape that was murderous and genocidal to Southern blacks, it was the overkill retaliation at the hands of white men, but this important distinction perpetually eluded the lef t's ideologues.

I need to tread gently here. The lef t fought hard for its symbols of racial injustice, making bewildered heroes out of a handful of pathetic, semiliterate fellows caught in the jaws of Southern jurisprudence who only wanted to beat the rap. What ever else one cares to believe about the Communist Party and the progressive movement, one should be forever mindful of its indi vidual members' selfless, pioneering devotion to the question of black equality long before it became fashionable or politically urgent within liberal circles. Yet because of the national hysteria of the McCarthyite years, any case the Communists took on and publicized became for all practical purposes a Communist cause from which others ran as if from a plague. Few people did not line up according to their political perspective on any given issue the Communists chose to publicize, and many a case was decided in the timid court of public opinion on the basis of whether or not a modest compromise-a commutation of the death sentence would give aid and succor to the Communist cause.

For its part, the lef t, in its increasing paranoia and raging impotence, vilified and excoriated the hapless white woman whose original charge had wreaked such total destruction upon the hap-

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.AGAINST OUR WILL

less black. The standard defense strategy for puncturing holes in a rape case was ( and is) an attempt to destroy the credibility of the complaining witness by smearing her as mentally unbalanced, or as sexually frustrated, or as an oversexed, promiscuous whore. In its mass-protest campaigns to save the lives of convicted black rapists, the lef t employed all these tactics, and more, against white women with a virulence that bordered on hate.

Most of the cases have since passed into oblivion, except in the minds of readers of the old Daily Worker who are blessed with total recall. Some, like the Martinsville Seven, executed by the state of Virginia in February, i951, for gang-raping a thirty-two year-old white woman, a Jehovah's Witness who sold the Watch tower in the black part of town, barely broke through the sound barrier of the lef t, perhaps because their case had no complexity to it, little room for speculation, and the nation had yet to be sensi tized to the issue of capital punishment even when a state felled seven with one blow. And perhaps because the lef t had been able to make so little headway on the Martinsville case, vilification of the white woman reached an all-time high.
In
a signed article printed in the Worker for two days running while the Martinsville Seven met their death, a writer put forward a series of feverish questions:

Why did she change her story between the time of the alleged "attack" and the preliminary hearing a month later?

Why did she say at first that she was "attacked" by
13
or 14 men and then later changed it to
"12
or
13
times"?

Was it not a fact that she had been promised $5? Was it not a fact that she accepted the offer?

Was it not a fact that she had dates in the past with one of the men?

Why did she insist on leaving the hospital on the night of the alleged "attack" af ter speaking with her husband?

Who came to visit her that night at her home? What instructions did those visitors give her?

What promises of financial support were made, and by whom?

What organizations and individuals gave her money, and how much?

What promises did she make in return for this money? Questions like these were being asked all over town. The an

swers to these questions would have exposed the frameup in this

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
239

case. That's why they weren't asked. That's why they were carefully avoided . . .

"Questions like these" were a hodgepodge of innuendo, but they fueled the Worker reader who thrived on conspiracy.

And then there was Willie McGee, the filling station atten dant and truck driver whose death in a portable electric chair trundled for the occasion to the Laurel, Mississippi, courtroom where he was first convicted made page one of
The
New
York
Times
for May 8,
1951,
and the front page of newspapers through out the world.

McGee had three trials in all, and three convictions-two by all-white, all-male juries and the third by an all-male jury of nine whites and three blacks (as in Alabama, women were not per mitted to serve on Mississippi juries ) . According to the prosecu tion, in the early morning of November
2,
1945,
while Willametta Hawkins, the wife of a postal worker, lay asleep with her sick childher husband and two othe1 children were sleeping in an adjoining room-a black intruder stole into her bed, warning that if she screamed or cried out he would cut her throat. :M:rs. Hawkins could not identif y her rapist in the darkness except to say that he had been drinking, but police investigation led to McGee within a day. A grocery firm had reported that one of its trucks was missing overnight along with driver Willie McGee and
$15.85
of the com pany's money; and a neighbor had noticed a grocery truck parked near the Jiawkins' home at 4:
30
A.M.
McGee was picked up the following afternoon. He turned in the company's money, saying he had not meant to keep it, and the larceny charge was dropped. Instead he was charged with rape. A deputy sheriff extracted a confession from him, a confession that McGee later repudiated by saying he had been beaten and kept in a sweatbox until he cried guilty.

In
all three trials McGee never took the stand in his own defense. His lawyers vainly claimed that he had been drinking in Hattiesburg, thirty miles away, when the rape took place. The first trial was a one-day affair in which the jury deliberated for two and a half minutes while guardsmen kept an angry mob in the streets at bay. The second trial, granted on a change-of-venue appeal that a fair trial for McGee had been impossible in Laurel, was conducted in Hattiesburg with similar results. The third trial, granted on the

24c
AGAINST OUR Wll.L

appeal that black men had been kept off the jury, was held back in Laurel. Circuit Judge Burkitt Collins, who presided at all three trials, three times ·sentenced Willie McGee to death.

No white man had ever been executed for rape in Mississippi, while McGee was the latest in a long row of condemned blacks. On this basis-unequal treatment under the law-a national Save Willie McGee campaign began to mount. McGee's new lawyers, hired by the Civil Rights Congress, had hinted at the third tril that there was more to the McGee case than had been divulged in court, and in March of i951 Mrs. Rosalee McGee, McGee's wife and the mother of his four children, held an emotional press conference in New York. Her husband was no drunken intruder whom Mrs. Hawkins couldn't identify in the dark, she told re porters; he was the victim of a frameup. According to Rosalee McGee, Willametta Hawkins knew Willie quite well-they'd been having an on-and-off affair for years, an affair that Mrs. Haw kins had instigated and McGee had tried to break off.

As Mrs. McGee told it, the affair started back in i942 before her husband had gone into the Army when Mrs. Hawkins proposi tioned McGee by leaving a note for him in the nozzle of a gas hose in the filling station where he worked. "Down South you tell a woman like that 'no' and she'll cry rape anyway," Rosalee McGee explained. When McGee came out of the Army the following year and returned to Laurel, the notes and the affair resumed, with McGee as a most reluctant participant, according to his wife. Once he had even gone out to California with the idea of settling there, just to escape Mrs. Hawkins, she said, but he couldn't find work and had to come back. Rosalee McGee informed the press that she had not spoken up and told this story in court "because the lynch mob would've got me." She concluded, "I don't know what hap pened between Mrs. Hawkins and her husband. But af ter Willie was picked up by the police that night, everybody in the block said that they had a big argument and that he was chasing her right out into the street at five o'clock in the morning. So she could save herself from her husband, she figured she'll say she was raped."

One of the few nepapers to report Mrs. McGee's press conference in full was the
Daily
Worker, which stoked the fire and kept the McGee case on its front page for the next two months. The Worker called Willametta Hawkins a Potiphar's wife and McGee became a modern-day Joseph, "a slave in the kingdom of

A QUESTION OF RACE 241

jimcrow," who had tried to run from Mrs. Hawkins' clutches. Worker reporters sent out to interview "the ordinary people" came back with quotes like "I've always been skeptical about this rape business" and "I'm convinced it is almost impossible to rape a woman if she doesn't really want it." Inevitably, the rhetoric grew bolder as the days grew shorter·for Willie McGee. At the end of March the Worker editorialized, "The woman who said McGee 'raped' her was known to the entire community as having had a prolonged relationship with him . . . that she initiated and in sisted on continuing against the will of her victim." The following month Mrs. McGee told a rally,
"If
there was any raping done, it was Mrs. Hawkins who raped my husband."